Quote:
Originally Posted by WCH
My X5M has the night vision option as I leased one off the lot, which was otherwise how I would have ordered it. It also has the full driver's assistance package. The night vision does light up people and animals but it requires you to look off to the side. I haven't really used it but also live near a city.
On the other hand, the driver's assistance put up a warning about a deer about 2 months ago. I thought it was a false positive but then I passed a deer on the side of the road hidden by trees! If I had slowed down when I got the warning, I would have easily been able to avoid the deer if it had run out into the road.
So despite my initial pessimism that these systems serve any useful purpose, I am pleasantly surprised. Still not sure it would work at highway speeds but certainly worked on a 45 mph road FWIW.
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Thanks to all who have replied. I didn't even realize there was a feature of the DAP to warn about deer in the instrument cluster or in the HUD, so thanks for that, very good to know. Is that feature dependent on having the FLIR camera installed to detect them, or does it work on some other principle?
I just did some googling and downloaded the F85 online manual and it seems that there is a dependency there so that I would need to have that night vision with pedestrian detection option on the car for the notifications to take place in the instrument cluster and HUD. Do others agree this is true or have people who have DAP but don't have NV gotten warnings for deer?
I wonder if that Night Vision camera system can economically be added to a car that did not ship with it.
BMW does seem to say that a warning only occurs if the car judges a collision to be imminent and that isn't what I'd ideally want, I'd like a warning to appear in the HUD any time it detects a large animal so that I could be extra cautious and looking for how I will avoid if it suddenly jumps toward me. Perhaps this could be a feature they can add in the future. It seems that this would be the sort of thing that self driving cars would also want to have, to spot the danger of large animals nearby and then either slow down or otherwise prepare to deal with them according to how they behave.